After Eddie had an enjoyable little walk around Chatsworth I managed to find a chance to go to John Lewis to buy a replacement Apple Keyboard, handy they had some because i didn’t relish another stressful journey to Meadowhell, and hey, John Lewis sell them for a pound less than Apple themselves. Woohoo, bargin. haha, thing is, I’ve noticed the lettering seems a little different on this one, some labels such as “delete” are written more largely and so are others, after being used to my old one its a little disconcerting, as if this new one is a cheap rip-off. Also the labeling is a little paler than my other. Ah well, despite this its actually always nice to have a new keyboard, you can really feel the difference compared to an old soiled one where the keys have over time gotten a bit of a squeeky friction to them.

Now I just need to demand 19 quid from my brother.

My iMac’s Superdrive is no longer very super. Last week it started making some worrying scraping sounds whilst both spinning up, and spinning down. Also, around the same period the eject mechanism became clunky, in fact one time it ejected with such force that the disk fell out and plopped onto my desk making me jump with fright. Then, it started rejecting some disks, for example I tried to re-rip “blue lines” by massive attack, but when inserting the disk it made just a quick mechanical moan and ejected it, and no amount of persistence would get it to keep it inside.

The last straw came today when, after burning a dvd the eject mechanism failed to dismiss the disk. Each time I held eject it would make the obligatory clink-clunk.. pause and then clunk-a-junk it back in again. Well that ain’t much good now is it?

I hate speaking on the phone, I sweat and pant and panic and go dizzy. But I really wanted to know if I could wait for the meadowhall store to get a replacement drive in before I made a trip up there, and plus if I did so I wouldn’t be without the iMac for too long. So I hunted out the branches number but upon the automated menu I made the mistake of choosing tech support rather than waiting for an operator and was redirected to some call centre to be greeted by some woman with a peculiar accent who also spokeveryquickly, I think I said “pardon” about 50 times, really really embarrassing and it doesn’t do my phone anxiety much good at all. In the end it turned out that the tech support line can’t actually access the stock info of branches, so I hung up and tried again. This time I learned from my mistake and got to speak to someone at meadowhall. Unfortunately they told me that they haven’t my particular optical drive in stock and even still they can’t order one until checking mine out
So I’ve taken it in and now i’m minus iMac Tell yer what though, having an Apple Store in town is soooo useful, the 20″ iMac’s box is freaking huge so it would be an absolute nightmare having to ship it off to some far away repair centre.

I did want to open the iMac myself to see if I could just get the disk out and somehow whack the drive back into life but apart from the memory’s cover the iMac has those odd looking astrisk shaped screws, a sure sign that you’re not meant to open it up.

I’d like to add that Apple are in an unfortunate position with the optical drives on the iMac, if you hold a normal PC’s internal optical drive against the current iMac it’s immediately obvious that Apple would need some of the doctor’s Tardis technology to fit it inside because not only would there be no room left but it wouldn’t actually be possible even if the iMac was empty inside. So they have to use the slim-line drives, like the ones in laptops, which are slow(ish) noisy and very unreliable. But that doesn’t tend to matter so much with a laptop because you don’t use the drive all that often. But I use the drive on my iMac all the time and slim-line drives just don’t last well. It’s a problem.

In a few moments my iBook will probably be super-ceeded by something incredibly cheap and powerful. So for the time I still have left to feel I own something half-decent i’ll talk about my macs trip to the vets. As i’ve mentioned before there’s no shortage of staff at the apple store, as I entered the sweet smelling ikea clad store the staff all ran over each other trying to get to me “he’s mine!” “No! I saw him first!”. I just marched past them all to the “Genius bar” and slapped my iBook on the desk and grabbed a stool doing my best clint impression. Now things started to get a little surreal, I’m used to having to argue my case in PC stores, having to explain that it isn’t too much to ask to expect something to be repaired when it’s under warranty. But at Apple I showed them the slight skewed display and straight away he said “Oh we’ll take the whole screen off and attach a new one, we’ll have to order one in, if you’d like you can bring it back in when we have to part and we’ll fix it whilst you wait. That way you won’t be without it for days.” I was actually speechless, you just don’t expect service like that from PC companies. And this isn’t the expensive warranty, just he bog standard freebie! And it was my fault that it’s broken, though obviously I didn’t tell them that. lol. What a pleasant trip.

UPDATE: Phew, looks like there isn’t a new iBook after-all. It’s a new intel iMac and an all new replacement for the powerbook called the revenge of the macbook 2097 or something. Either-way, they’re things i couldn’t have afford anyway.

I’ve been messing with tags again today, removing the more pointless ones from entries and removing spaces from those with multiple words. Also, strangely it seems that MT-Tags does actually add keywords as a sub-catagory of “tags”, even though when I first installed it I ended up with a million and 1 primary catagories. So i’ve tidied that up now and I feel a lot better for it.

So yeah, I was playing with my tag cloud thing and randomly clicked on one of the technorati links, one that took me to http://www.technorati.com/tag/meadowhall and ooh, all of them but 1 are mine. No wait, I don’t remember ever calling my blog after my real name “Mark Gilbert”, so what’s this. OMG, what are the chances of that, a name-sake also blogging about meadowhall. Wait, even more OMG, he lives in sheffield, and he blogs about similar things as I do. Have I got a split personality? Am I running 2 blogs and neither personalities know of each others? I’m scared. Funnily enough my other blog isn’t half bad, think I’ll subscribe and keep up with what my split personality is getting up to. He must quite like my name, i mean his name, mine his um, the name to have bought the domain. Myself, I hate it, but that’s probably a low self-esteem thing. I wonder if we’ve ever bumped into each other.

So I neively ride on into Christmas town casting aside all doubts that it will be my usual sucky accident laiden yule-tide hell. It started off so well, we went to my brothers who put on a great spread, his first time preparing a christmas dinner and it’s always entertaining watching my brother stressing in the kitchen whilst I generally get in the way. We spent most of the day drinking far too much, being merry whilst making fun of Eddie, who was SO well behaved! He surprised us all, such a good doggy Well mostly, first mistake of the day was leaving the turkey on the table when we left the dining room. Some time later Eddie sneaked off, we looked everywhere and found him under the dinning table with a huge chunk of the turkey, with bone, growling at us to keep away. He must have reached onto the table and bit it straight off so my brother was pissed swearing that in no way is he going to save the rest of the turkey now. Haha. Eddie takes the funniest photo’s, how mad does he look there! I don’t know how on earth the camera made his hair all stick up like that, and since when did Eddie have a big brown beard??? Sure, its getting a bit dirty looking from his saliva stains, but seriously, it looks no way near that brown in real life. Stupid camera.
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Went into the apple store today and i’ve gotta say i was a little under-whelmed. It’s smaller than I expected, I reckon it’s probably closer to the size of their mini-stores, but they probably aren’t opening them as mini-stores in this country. They do do workshops, but i can’t imagine where, they must have to all huddle together on the floor in a corner. Also, big complaint, there’s way too many sales staff with nothing to do, I counted 12, I felt like I was in a south park at one point as one member of staff approached me uninvited delaring excitedly “oooh oooh lemmie just adjust this ipod strap, it’s cutting off the circulation”.. “um, so? oh ok… actually please go away”. So, note to apple, we don’t like the hard sell style in the UK, especially in the north lol. On the upside I had a nice play with aperture on a dual 30″ screen setup and I dribbled a bit.

Waaaa Waaaaa Waaaaa. I’ve been waiting yonks for Apple to open their Sheffield store and they have to go and open it on a december saturday. You can hardly even get into Meadowhell (sheffield’s mall) during the run up to christmas, let alone the 2nd to last Saturday before Christmas + The Apple store opening day!

It’ll be freakin’ hell.

Damn you Apple